Two Key Concepts
2.1.1 Some Key Necessary Conditions: State Power, Royal Control over Land, and Conditionality
How is state power defined? The major sociological treatment of social power remains that of Michael Mann, who identified four sources: ideoÂlogical, economic, military, and political.[104] Here, the emphasis is on state control of land, which combines all four sources.
Land was the most important economic resource in the period and is still relevant in the developing world today.[105]State control of land in the premodern period is typically identified with patrimonialism, where state land was the personal estate of the ruler, fusing the notions of public and private.9 This is often identified with nonÂWestern regimes, such as “tsarist” Russia or the “sultanic” Ottoman Empire,10 emblematic of their divergent paths and limited “freedoms.”11 Yet, state control of land was the default condition throughout the premodern world, in both East and West, especially in the prototypical constitutional state, England. Strangely enough, the literature has not noted that in England, as legal textbooks affirm to this day, “all land is owned by the Crown. A small part of that land is in the Crown’s own occupation” (known as demesne land). The “rest is occupied by tenants holding either directly or indirectly from the Crown”; allodial land (land not subject to obligations to an overlord or ultimately the king) “is unknown.”[106]
This land regime dates to the Norman Conquest in 1066, though major reforms occurred in 1660 and 1925.[107] Subjects did not “own” land in the absolute sense understood in Roman law; even the highest lords were “tenants-in-chief.” Tenants had the obligation to offer military, judicial, and administrative service, counsel on government affairs, and financial aid; their inheritance was restricted and they could be dispossessed of their land for wrongdoing.
As we will see in Chapter 3, obligations on all orders of English tenants were astonishingly broad.[108] Control of land rights thus cannot distinguish between East and West; rather, I argue, the difference lay in whether rulers could enforce such rights and in whether they granted land conditionally or not. England was more effectÂive on both counts.Following the classic statement by Joseph Schumpeter, scholars have often assumed that kings’ de facto control over land was confined to the royal demesne, thus attributing representation to the demesne’s increasÂing inadequacy in meeting royal expenses.[109] This indeed occurred in Continental cases; it also, however, greatly contributed to the precarious trajectory of representation in that region, as this book argues. In England, historians have noted that kings’ demesne resources were “insignificant” already from the earliest period of the Angevins (1154-1216)[110] - their public powers as kings were, however, unrivaled.
Even before Parliament emerged, English kings controlled land far more effectively than French and other Continental rulers, owing to two advantages. They inherited a “ubiquitous” system of Anglo-Saxon counÂties and hundreds (itself the product of strong Danish kingships), whereas its Carolingian equivalent in France was very weakly enforced.[111] [112] This was no mere path-dependent heritage, however: William I had exterminated the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy that controlled most land and had brutally suppressed rebellions after 1066.18 He reversed the previous land distriÂbution by appropriating directly 64 percent of land by area and more than a fifth of the land by value directly and a quarter of its income. The key was that he granted about half the kingdom to Norman nobles conditionally, none of whom held individually more than about 10 percent. The Church held about a quarter of the land.[113]
Crown tenants-in-chief were the main political actors in the early stages of institution-building.
Kings controlled them through “the blunt instruÂment of confiscation and disinheritance,” though they also resorted to the “destruction of castles and the payment of ransom.”[114] Royal conflicts with the barons are vividly traced by historians, creating an image of royal weakness.[115] However, overall, the top ranks depended on the crown more intensely than on the Continent. Though scholars focus on the increased security of property rights in England,[116] it is the rights of lower tenants at the expense of lords that were being fortified in royal courts through the common law, as we will see. The lords did not acquire more secure tenure in the twelfth century. Instead, even earls saw their tenures frequently disrupted by the king;[117] this was “a key element” in royal power.[118]Similar (though not identical) terms of land control are found across the cases in this book. Conditional land grants to nobles were widely observed, but conditionality varied across cases. It was also relatively high in Catalonia, twelfth-century Castile, the Low Countries, in declining intensity and consistency. Conditionality also underlay the French king’s power. Yet his de facto jurisdiction was confined to the royal domain, the Ile-de-France.[119] Faced with vassals who often controlled forces rivaling his own, the French king lacked analogous compelling powers. In order to pacify the land, French kings needed the Church’s cooperation and invoked the Peace of God; the English king imposed the King’s Peace.26
In fact, conditionality was often weakly imposed across cases. It was confined to the lower social orders in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Russia and limited as far as the upper nobility was concerned. Where higher orders had allodial rights, we will find that representation was undermined. However, whether conditionality was successfully enforced was not a function of representative institutions, since it often long preceded them, as in England.
It was instead tied to overall state capacity, which, in turn, was originally independent of economic wealth or its usual proxy, urbanization. Rights were more conditional in England than Castile, though England was poorer around 1300. English GDP per capita is estimated between 50 and 70 percent that of Spain around 1300, as calculated by economic historians Alvarez-Nogal and Prados de La Escosura,[120] while English urbanization was a paltry 4 percent to the Iberian peninsula’s 30 percent, with the largest cities being in Castilian territory.[121] Yet English kings enforced conditionality more effectively.Why some regimes adopted mostly conditional rather than allodial rights is not easily explained but it was also independent of parliamentary structures - conditionality is found in the Ottoman Empire as well, as Chapter 11 shows, and throughout the premodern world.
The historical term often employed for these conditional grants of land is “feudalism.”[122] The term is both controversial and multivalent.[123] It also involves concepts like vassalage and homage that specify the relation between the lord and his dependents. These concepts undergird the assumption of a feudal “contract” between lord and vassal that scholars have posited as a crucial medieval legacy for modern democracy.[124] But the analysis of the Ottoman case in Chapter 11 will show that it is misguided to assume contracts per se were unique to the West.[125] The perspective taken in this argument, by focusing on the general principle of conditionality rather than the specific forms it could take, is not affected by these controversies, so I have avoided using feudalism as a term.
The dependent variable in this book is how polity-wide representative institutions emerged as central organs of governance, namely as instituÂtions that generated the rules applying to and integrating most citizens.[126] This is the institutional foundation and precedent for what is commonly called constitutionalism, namely the principle that government should be delimited by laws.[127] What matters for this analysis is that this process integrates not only urban dwellers, merchants, or communes but landÂholders and peasants as well, i.e.
a diversified society over an extended territory.[128] Local assemblies were actually so widespread throughout Europe, in villages, cities, city-leagues, and principalities, that their emerÂgence is not the hardest puzzle. Accordingly, the aim is not to explain the practice of representation per se; this is non-controversially traced to classical and Church precedents that revived throughout Southern Europe after the eleventh century, as well as to Northern European traditions.[129]As we will see, localized assemblies did not naturally scale up to repreÂsentative governance at the polity level. The bigger polities that mainly included representatives from towns rather than the broader countryside, like France and Castile, became absolutist. Most city-states were replaced by principalities. Yet city-state and territorial assemblies are typically treaÂted as instances of the same phenomenon.[130] Representation in city-states responded to different incentives than in more extensive territories, howÂever, as I argue in Chapter 7. They also failed to integrate non-urban populations. The conditions for effective statehood - fiscal centralization that allows the state to exercise distributive politics and influential groups being incentivized to enforce them[131] - are better exemplified by England.[132] Republics never solved the fundamental political problem of including extensive and diverse populations under unified rule. The two federations that did, Switzerland and the Netherlands, displayed, as we will see, some critical similarities with England.
The literature typically selects criteria that proved crucial for the modÂern history of effective representation: inclusion of the third estate, voting, collection and administration of taxation, veto power, frequency of meetÂings, election of the executive.[133] On all these counts, city-states were often far ahead compared to territorial states.
Yet, later chapters will show that the more advanced an institution was along many of these radical dimenÂsions early in its development, the less long-lived and/or inclusive it was - these features therefore do not correlate with the consolidation of the institution over time. This is a key paradox of representative dynamics: what is important for modern outcomes was often inhibiting in the early stages of emergence.Take, for instance, frequency.[134] A parliament that meets twice a year does not necessarily constrain a ruler’s power more than one that meets once every two years - especially given, as this book argues, that parliaÂments often reflected the will of the ruler rather than of the people. Fewer meetings may indicate inconclusiveness or greater societal capacity to resist.[135] Moreover, frequency has to be weighted by duration. English parliaments could last from 17 days to 190.[136] Whereas long duration could mean an excess of business, it could also occur because parliament would not grant taxation, in which case extended sessions became “open forms of coercion of a reluctant assembly” by the ruler.[137] When frequency was halved in England in the 1400s, it was counterbalanced by longer length.[138] Without a link to ultimate outcomes, frequency cannot inform us about assembly strength.
Another common indicator is inclusion of the third estate.[139] Blockmans, for instance, showed how even “emancipated communes of free peasants gradually developed representative systems from the bottom up” and often princes were not necessary.47 However, areas where this occurred (as in the rich agricultural regions of north-central Europe) are not where polity-wide representative institutions prevailed (with the aforementioned Swiss and Dutch qualified exceptions discussed in Chapter 7). Rather, they prevailed where the nobility was more effectively compelled by the ruler. From the perspective of this analysis, therefore, distinguishing between pre-parliaments including nobles and “full” verÂsions that included urban representatives would be misleading.[140] Both councils and meetings designated as parliaments are relevant, since “conÂtemporaries were far less concerned than modern scholarship” about these distinctions.[141]
A more consequential variation, I argue, was between communities that sent their representatives with full powers to commit them to the king’s requests (plenapotestas) or with strict instructions, i.e. an imperative mandate, that stripped them of the authority to bind the community to a central decision.[142] Although the latter format appears more democratic, it undermined effective governance and encouraged fragmentation. Where central decisions became binding across the polity instead, parliaÂment became a more effective central organ of governance. Otherwise it was just a bargaining device with groups that were socially and geographÂically separate, as was widely observed not just in European polities that turned absolutist, but in non-western regions as well.
Rejecting a sharp break like inclusion of urban groups as definitive, however, fuses the logic of emergence with that of consolidation over time. Ultimately, as we shall see, the issue is not simply a historical account of origins that ends at some conventional date but a theoretically informed specification of the core ingredients of a formula that proved resilient over time. Without assuming any teleology, the English Parliament became robust enough to survive even under the “absolutist” threats of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the conflicts of the fifteenth. For an institution to become path-dependent, its key features had to achieve “lock-in.” Path-dependence, according to Mahoney’s concise definition, involves “historical sequences in which contingent events set into motion institutional patterns or event chains that have deterministic properties.” These patterns or event chains made change very costly, which is how the institution “locked-in.”[143] In England, this process stretched into the fourteenth century, as we will see. Parliamentary emergence was a process, not an event. Accordingly, this account will treat emergence and early consolidation as intertwined.
Survival into the modern period is analytically separate, however. As Blockmans wrote, “it was not the privilege of one particular type of institution: until the end of the ancien regime, federations of towns and villages, as well as regional and general estates and parliaments, Landtage and Reichstage, with two, three or four chambers continued to function.”[144] Nonetheless, by 1800, polity-wide institutions that inteÂgrated different social groups, that actually legislated and governed with (some) popular participation, and that mainly required expanding the electorate to become fully democratic, instead of regime change, even revolution, were rare; England stands out.[145]
It is also important to distinguish this account from much contemporÂary scholarship that does not explain representative institutions or pracÂtices per se, but related concepts that are easily conflated with them. Schumpeter’s classic article explained “the tax state,” Tilly explained state emergence, Levi national revenue systems and policies, North, Wallis, and Weingast explained open social orders.[146] Representative emergence also differs from determining tax-and-spend equilibria in advanced democracies.[147] Finally, representation is also a separate dependent variable from democracy, as scholars emphasize,[148] though empirically the two concepts are indeed fused in the post-war period. Representative institutions predated the universal franchise by centuries. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 introduced free and almost universal suffrage, but it was preceded by the Confederate Diet (the Bundestag), which drew on the Imperial Diet (the Reichstag), itself dating to the medieval Holy Roman Empire.
Yet bargaining over taxation appears intuitively important,[149] especially given powerful mottos like “no taxation without representation,” and the frequent conflation of representation with democracy has increased its apparent plausibility as a key mechanism. It is important to note, thereÂfore, that suffrage increases have only rarely been linked to taxation - most strikingly via the women’s vote.58 Where the bargaining logic has illuminated the process of democratization - how institutions expanded to include broader social groups or how they extended more rights to included groups - it has typically been through war59 and the fear of revolution60 not taxation of empowered groups. Taxation per se is instead usually a dependent variable in the literature.61 Tilly, in a brief statement, linked democracy to “intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycles,” exemplified by absolutist France. But these led not to democracy but to revolution, terror, monarchy, and two empires, before becoming democratic.[150] Historical origins suggest the disconnect is not accidental. In any case, universal suffrage is analytically distinct from whether a central institution exists that local actors have incentives to support or attend.
2.2